Dewey Dickey Lives

The team made a spot for him, because Dickey had announced at the winter meeting that he didn’t think he would be fit enough to win any races that season, but was willing to work for the others. He now wondered if he would be capable of doing that much.

One might think at such low moments that Lance Armstrong, who had battled back from brain surgery himself, might have been an inspiration. They had raced together when younger; but Dickey found strength in his faith.

He was accustomed to praying before races for safety and wisdom. When he almost went blind, radiation attacked him, and diarrhea drained him, his faith kept him positive. “Things change, like friends, health things not working out, and so on, but God never does,” he says. “It’s something you can always count on.”

With the desire to reassert himself on the cycling scene as his motivation, Dickey kept training. At the end of June, he felt like he was getting some form. It was his chance to prove that his success in 2001 wasn’t a fluke of steroid-induced fortune. That his body, wracked as it had been, had repaired itself and was capable of racing’s demands. That he could be himself again, a dominant force of nature. But if he couldn’t hold the pace, he would watch the pack pull away and with them his life. He had nothing to take cycling’s place.

Dickey strapped on his ileostomy bag, loaded up his Bianchi and went to Ohio for the Tour of Ohio, fully aware of the race’s stakes.

Amazingly, he won a stage. In July, he won the Northfield Criterium. In August, he led out teammate Pete Hanna to give Hanna the win at the thirty-and-over National Criterium Championship, and the next day, he powered the chase to catch a breakaway.

But it was not all a happy tailwind from there. After Labor Day, Dickey underwent two more surgeries to have a J-pouch implanted, a procedure that uses a section of the small intestine to replace the function of the colon. He was back on his bike four weeks later.

In January, he headed to Spain for two months of training. By mid-April, he was fit and hoping to build on last year’s success with a handful of stage races across the country this summer, possibly even the Tour of Panama in the fall. “He’s going to win races this year,” teammate Sartain says. “Quote me on that.”

When Dickey showed up at his first race of the 2006 season, in April in Iowa, a cycling blogger reported Dickey’s presence under the heading “Dewey Dickey Lives.”

To be able to take part in what he calls the “hardest and most beautiful sport in the world” indeed grants him life—the only life he knows. A life, you can trust, he values.  

John Rosengren is a Minneapolis writer. He is coauthor (with Esera Tuaolo) of Alone in the Trenches, published this year.